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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5430407" data-attributes="member: 4937">In the long history of ridiculous attacks on my statements, this has to be the most ridiculous one.  If there is one that exceeds it, I have thankfully scrubbed it form my memory.Yes, it is deception by trickery.  I'm pretending to play a monster that wants to kill the PC's and preserve its own existance, but in fact I'm actually playing with the goal of having the monster die and preserving the existance of the PC's.  That is deception.  If you don't think that is deception, why don't you come out and tell the players that your deliberately misplaying monsters.Yes, it is deprivation by trickery.  I am depriving the PC's of their oppurtunity for honest victory.  We we go into combat, we are moving into something that is largely a tactical subgame.  In this subgame, the assumption of the player is that they are obtaining victory through creative play and tactical accumen - not because the DM is throwing the subgame.This is illusionism.  This is fooling the players into believe that they are in a life and death struggle, while pulling your punches so as to reduce the chance that it will actually be a life and death struggle.Yes, this is acting dishonestly.  Why don't you try playing this way while revealing to your players that you are doing it.  "Well, this Ogre Barbarian would maximize his expected damage if he power attacked for 3 here, but I'm not going to because I know you only have 13 hit points and you'll probably die if I do so and the blow hits."   Go ahead and see how well the game would play if you were actually being honest about what you are doing here.Let's say the party finds itself needing to slay a clan of ogres who have been molesting travellers.  Almost always they will do their best to murder the ogres in the most brutal and effective manner possible, and they are supposed to be the good guys having some amount of human feeling and commitment to mercy.  How much less reasonable is it for a monster, without mercy, loving bloodshed, and with its life on the line to not do everything in its power to resist the PC's?   I mean, these are somewhat stupid selfish creature, and it might be reasonable if their defence was somewhat uncoordinated or if one or more tried to flee at the others expense if the battle was turning against them, but how reasonable and true to the character of the ogres is it for them to hold back and pull their blows?  And how reasonable is this when the actual reason for the holding back and pulling the blows is to ensure the death of the ogres?  Yes, that is treating the players with kid gloves.  I don't see how you think it isn't.Yes, because that's not what I said either.  I said PA was important to melee characters who wanted to deal more than 50 damage in a single blow - thereby triggering a massive damage save (ei, 'Save or Die').  We could call this the 'Great Axe' strategy.  But that is only one of many potential strategies for a melee character.  As just an example, another strategy would be to maximize the number of attacks you make in a single round - doing less damage per blow but perhaps more damage total.   Another strategy might be to maximize not the maximum damage but the average damage that your blows did, without regard to whether you regularly provoked a massive damage save in the target.  All that was I think clear from my context, and in this context I think it ought to be fully clear why limiting power attack in this way was good for the players on the whole.  To say nothing of the fact that my other concern is making sure that 'sword and board' is a very viable strategy as well.Please don't try to tell me about my rules.  Superior Cleave under my rules is a feat that allows you to take a 5' step after dropping a target.  The real limit here isn't movement rate, but the number of attacks of oppurtunity you can make (but there are feats to fix that).   And there are also ways to fix the problem of chaining the cleaves together, for example Avalanche Attack.Secret Technique (Cleave) means that any attack triggered by you Cleave feat automatically threatens a critical hit if it succeeds.   Improved Precision means that any time you threaten a critical hit, you may add your base reflex save to the roll to confirm the critical hit.The way you do this is if you have a corridor tightly packed with mooks, you take your +2 Brutal Greataxe or some such and you start flailing on targets till they drop, then you take your 5' step down the corridor and Cleave which automatically threatens a critical that you are very likely to confirm.  That does triple (quadruple if your weapon is Brutal) damage, which is the equivalent of a full round attack.  That drops the mook and you take another step, and activate cleave and do the same thing.  And you can keep doing that as long as you have attacks of oppurtunity left.  If the cleave doesn't quite drop the mook, you can use the next attack in your iterative attacks to try to drop it so you can continue the chain.   And that's to say nothing of what might happen if you have other feats that let you move and attack. Well, there you have it.  And the important thing to remember is that it's really hard to dispatch higher HP enemies with things like Lightning Bolt and Cone of Cold as well, because monsters tend to have more HD than CR and they tend to have CON bonuses and direct damage spells are dice capped in 3.X.  So your 10 die lightning bolt doing average 35 damage before we discuss saving throws and energy resistance (to say nothing of mooks with the Heavy Infantry feat forming a shield wall) is unlikely to be any more effective than the above plan and probably a good deal less effectiveWhat is this?  Aren't you reading?  Does it sound like I'm trying to take things away from melee combatants?  The only tables that give more to the melee combatants than mine are tables that turn melee combatants into spell casters (via for example Tome of Battle) and even then its questionable that on a relative scale (what you are expected to face in my game compared to what a game that features heavily optimized characters from multiple splatbooks are expected to face) that I'm giving less options to them.In stock unmodified 3.5 most melee builds involved two-handed weapons.  Those that didn't involved the interaction of a few broken feats like Robilar's Gambit.  The reason for having power attack do 1.5 damage per point is to keep it in line with the strength bonus you get from a two-handed weapon and prevent it from being the clearly best build.  It's worth noting that at the same time I talked about what I had taken away, I was also talking about what I'd given back - the 3.0 rules allowing power attack to be used with light weapons which allowed for Weapon Fineese + Power Attack combos.  I think the problem here must be the recent cosolidation of the boards.  This is now the house rules forum.   We are talking about what has been banned and many people are responding, "Well, I have banned only a small list, but I've tweaked downward alot of things that could be broken."   I would imagine a lot of people have adopted the damage bonus from power attack with a two-handed weapon is 1.5 rule because it just makes sense.  Maybe it is true that in stock 3.X (particularly limited to the SRD), the only viable melee build is Power Attacking with a Two-Handed sword or Guisarme something of the sort, and if the only tweak you made to the whole rules set was adjusting Power Attack downward then you'd be taking away the only thing melee had.  However, whether that is true or not, it should be plenty clear that for most of us with a banned list, banning or nerfing something isn't the only adjustment we've made. The thing taken away (double damage on power attack when wielding two-handed) wasn't perfectly balanced.  And despite your obscene references, I honestly feel that no one could read my posts in this thread and think that all I'm doing is taking things away unless they had a chip on their shoulder that predisposed them to see that regardless of what was in front of them.</blockquote>

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